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Subject: harbinger-digest V2 #13
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harbinger-digest         Sunday, July 20 1997         Volume 02 : Number 013




HARBINGER DIGEST

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Today's Subjects:
----------------
  (harbinger) TIME/LILITH FAIR           [borchers@bluemoon.net (m borchers)]
  (harbinger) some random offerings....                   [HunterXTC@aol.com]
  (harbinger) Canandaigua Lilith  [Allyson Kalea Boggess <boggessw@eznet.net]
  (harbinger) Michigan Lilith                              [ErinCBTM@aol.com]
  Re: (harbinger) 'Surfacing' & it's monotony              [Detour97@aol.com]
  Re: (harbinger) Hello                                    [Detour97@aol.com]
  Re: (harbinger) TIME/LILITH FAIR                           [Honoku@aol.com]
  Re: (harbinger) Canandaigua Lilith     [borchers@bluemoon.net (m borchers)]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 02:16:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: borchers@bluemoon.net (m borchers)
Subject: (harbinger) TIME/LILITH FAIR

DID YOU ALL SEE/READ TIME MAG THIS MONTH?

JULY 21, 1997 VOL. 150 NO. 3

THE ARTS/MUSIC

               GALAPALOOZA!
   LILITH FAIR--A TRAVELING FESTIVAL FEATURING
   FEMALE FOLK-POP STARS--IS ROCKING THE MUSIC
                                  WORLD

BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY


Summer in America. a time for blood-drenched, dumbed-down action-adventure
movies high on
corpses, dinosaurs and extraterrestrials, but low on heart. Summer in
America. Turn on the TV and
watch your tobacco-chawing interleague baseball games; lay down your $49.95
and catch a
championship-boxing match complete with an outrageous ear-chewing incident.
Summer in
America. Also a season for music: strutting macho megatours; draining
weekend-long rock
festivals; sweaty dance clubs throbbing with testosterone-filled techno.
Dial up Ticketmaster; go to
an outdoor alternative-rock show in a field, in a stadium; see the teeming,
churning mosh pits, the
muscular bare-chested frat boys, the sharp, scabbed elbows, the clomping
Reeboked feet, the
choking clouds of dust obscuring the stage ... What if summer were
different? What if the hottest
season of the year flexed a bit less and cared a bit more? What if the
months of July and August, at
least when it comes to music, were a tad more feminine and a bit more
feminist? What was it that
Virginia Woolf wrote back in 1929? "A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is
to write fiction." Might the same be true of pop music?

This summer female pop stars are clearing out space for themselves, and the
season's usual sea of
masculinity is parting. The debut CD by Alaskan pop-folkie Jewel, Pieces of
You (Atlantic), has
sold more than 5 million copies and is still riding high on the charts.
Erykah Badu, with her
poetry-slam soulfulness, has sold more than 1 million copies of her
brilliant new CD Baduizm
(Kedar Entertainment/Universal) and is a headliner on this summer's
neo-soul Smokin' Grooves
Tour. And Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan has masterminded the
summer's most
talked-about musical event: Lilith Fair, a traveling show featuring a
rotating lineup of 61 female
singer-songwriters, including Cassandra Wilson, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple,
Paula Cole, Jewel
and McLachlan herself. There's a different melody in the air: macho is out;
empathy is in. "People
want to be given hope," says Atlantic Records senior vice president Ron
Shapiro, "and these
female artists are giving young people a life preserver."

Call the new sound coffeehouse pop. It has a comforting warmth, a topping
of sugary froth, and it
provides a kind of buzz, like sipping a cappuccino in a corner cafe. It is
led, mostly, by female
singer-songwriters, writing primarily from a feminist point of view. On her
hit song Bitch,
Meredith Brooks declares that she wants to "reclaim a word that had taken
on a really derogatory
meaning." But ideology or no, these women are unafraid to celebrate their
own sensuality. On the
inside flap of her album, Jewel poses in a sexy yellow swimsuit.

This new music has the vigor of youth--McLachlan is 29, Jewel just 23--and
yet it echoes with
sounds of three decades past: the crisp emotionality of Joni Mitchell, the
artful lyrics of Bob Dylan.
While rooted in acoustic folk, it draws freely on blues, jazz and even
hip-hop. "There's no such
thing necessarily as a folk song or pop song," says jazz singer Wilson.
"What it is is not as
important as how you do it, and how you do it is not as important as why."

Coffeehouse pop is gentle but not tame--there is a quiescent anger within
it over social issues and
matters of the heart. The songs seek to engage life, not shrink from it.
"There was an innocence
that prevailed in the '60s that was crushed by the assassination of J.F.K.
and King," says Jewel.
"Our parents have become disillusioned. It is their disillusionment we deal
with in many ways; it's
a kind of crust we have to break through." In the title song on Pieces of
You, Jewel attacks
religious and sexual intolerance, her voice breaking as she sings, "You say
he's a faggot. Are you
afraid you're just the same?"; one of Chapman's newest songs is titled The
Rape of the World.

But unlike alternative rock, this music is less about stoking cynicism and
provoking anger than it is
about overcoming both. This is healing music, devoid of irony and flush
with optimism and
unabashed emotion. "Apathy is boring," says Cole. "It takes real courage to
have hope." This is
music that wants to feel, no matter how much it hurts. Says Jewel: "People
are hungry for
emotiveness. They want bare honesty, emotional blood-and-bone honesty."

The Lilith Fair, which kicked off July 5 in George, Wash., and will play 29
more cities in the U.S.
and Canada over the next two months, is a coming-out party for the new
sound, a chance for this
generation of female singer-songwriters to meet and greet each other, jam
onstage together, share
audiences and, perhaps, start a folk-pop revolution. It should be noted,
though, that some of the
recent talk about a surge in "women's music" could be seen as a veiled
slur. The music women
make is too varied for a single category, and the mediagenic notion of some
sort of "female sound"
could turn into a kind of velvet prison. Women, of course, have been major
players in music
throughout the rock era, so the idea that gals with guitars is something
new is an insult to such
folk-pop pioneers as Odetta and Joan Baez. The number of women at the top
of the charts of late,
however, and the impressive number of those who are playing Lilith is
indeed something fresh and
invigorating. "Of all the tours that you do during the summer," says Fiona
Apple, "this is pretty
much the coolest one."

The opening show in George's scenic Gorge Amphitheater was proof of that.
It was an intimate
extravaganza--with condom giveaways and information booths on issues like
rape and reproductive
rights--and the performances began with a hush and built to a dreamy sigh.
Lilith offers the
audience three stages, in separate locations, of gradually descending size
and occupied by
performers at staggered time intervals. McLachlan was the first act up,
playing a spare,
unassuming set by herself, holding only her acoustic guitar, on the third
and smallest stage, which
was about the size of a tollbooth. Cassandra Wilson, on the medium-size
second stage later in the
day, was the Fair's most disarming delight--her smart, laughing, 30-minute
set began with a few
dozen people watching but ended with several hundred, who gave her a
standing ovation. Jewel,
on the first and largest stage, was the high point. On record, her voice
sometimes has a tepid blond
wispiness; in concert, it has a crackling, sparks-flying, campfire warmth.
Finally McLachlan, with
her full band, appeared on the first stage to close out the day with a
serene set that shimmered like
twilight.

How does that Joni Mitchell song go? "I've looked at life from both sides
now ..." McLachlan has
certainly seen both sides in the music business. As the Founding Mother of
Lilith--and the only
performer playing every date--she is sure to win a wide new audience for
her lush, thoughtful
songcraft. Her new CD, Surfacing (Arista), out this week, is an elegant,
old-soul album, with
several standout songs, including the bewitching Building a Mystery and the
ravishing Adia. Radio
is already all over it. But not too long ago, McLachlan couldn't buy
airplay. "When my album
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy came out [in 1994], a lot of radio stations said
they couldn't play me
because they already had another singer-songwriter on their playlist,"
McLachlan says. "In this
case it was Tori Amos. That was very marginalizing because our music is
completely different.
They were saying, 'Go away--we've added our token female this week.'"

Then Alanis Morissette hit. Fifteen million copies sold. Next came Jewel.
More than 70 weeks on
the Billboard charts and still going. And McLachlan's own album Fumbling
ended up going double
platinum. Says Atlantic Records co-chairman Val Azzoli: "Honestly, we in
the record business are
not leaders. We are a bunch of sheep. When one kind of record does well, we
all follow with more
like it."

Danny Goldberg, the current CEO of Mercury Records, who signed Jewel to
Atlantic before
leaving that label, says there's a major musical shift under way. "I
associate it with generations of
high school students coming along who want ownership of their own culture,
who want something
different from the people who came before them," says Goldberg, who in the
past managed Bonnie
Raitt and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. "So this group is going for a
female-leaning, optimistic music, in
contrast to the grunge, gangsta-rap chapter that is waning."

The rise of Jewel and other female singer-songwriters has come hand in hand
with the growth of a
whole new generation-spanning radio format known in the music industry as
"modern adult
contemporary." Modern AC focuses on acts that are adult friendly but still
cool, performers with a
folkie feel, such as Counting Crows, Blues Traveler, Sister Hazel and the
Wallflowers. The format
also tends to feature female singer-songwriters such as Indigo Girls, Shawn
Colvin and Jewel--all
of whom just happen to be on the Lilith tour. "The blossoming of modern AC
was so important,"
says Terry McBride, who manages McLachlan. "Artists like Sarah, Fiona
[Apple] and Jewel have
always been at the bottom of [radio] playlists, but about 14 months ago, we
started getting some
attention. It helped us get the exposure we needed to be able to put on a
Lilith. It's helped all these
artists get to the next step up."

The format has a special appeal to female listeners: it allows them to hear
someone like themselves
instead of, say, someone like Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder. And record
companies like it because
women tend to buy more records than men. "Years ago, there used to be a
stigma held by
rock-radio programmers against playing too many female artists," says Bob
Waugh, assistant
programming director at modern-rock radio station WHFS in Washington. "Now
there has been
such an explosion of female artists and female-led bands coming to
prominence that the perception
has changed."

And Lilith Fair should change it even more. McLachlan, in conceiving the
event, drew inspiration
from the proto-feminist Hebrew legend of Lilith, Adam's first wife. Unlike
Eve, Lilith was not
spawned from Adam's rib but was created by God out of dust, just as Adam
was. But as soon as
Lilith and Adam were joined together, they began to quarrel. Adam said: "It
is your duty to obey
me." Lilith replied, "We are both equal ... and I will not be submissive to
you." Set that last quote
to music, and you'd have a fitting anthem for Lilith Fair.

McLachlan tried out the concept of an all-female tour on four test dates
last year, expanding the idea
this summer. "There wasn't necessarily a theme we were looking for, but we
all wanted a diverse
show," she says. "So [this year] we made sure to get people like Cassandra
Wilson, who is totally
doing her own thing with jazz and folk."

Wilson is happy to be involved. "The vibe that I bring to this is the voice
of free black women,"
she says. "Black women who are confident, sure of themselves in their
sexuality, confident in their
spirituality." Yet more black artists deserve to be on Lilith's bill.
Lilith organizers say they tried to
reach out; Erykah Badu was offered a slot on the tour but turned it down.
On the other hand, Laura
Love, a black, folk-tinged, Seattle-based singer-songwriter with a fine new
album, Octoroon,
asked to be part of Lilith and was passed over (the organizers say that
with 584 submissions, they
couldn't take everybody).

Still, Lilith is a welcome development. Right now, pop music is flaccid.
The prefab hype of Spice
Girls, the sugar-shock kiddie ditties of Hanson, the admirable
wholesomeness but inexcusable
tiresomeness of Bob Carlisle, the horrific power screeching of Celine
Dion--turn it off. Turn it all
off. It's meaningless olestra music, artificial and nutrient-free.

The Lilith tour and the coffeehouse-pop crowd can help halt pop's
garbage-chute slide. Such
music, on the surface, is gentle enough to slip onto radio playlists, but
down deep there are ideas,
there is emotion, there is life: the haunting, melancholic feel of
McLachlan's new tune Angel; Fiona
Apple exploring her post-rape trauma on her heart-rending Sullen Girl;
Erykah Badu imagining the
life of a gangsta's girlfriend on her soulful Otherside of the Game. Other
promising acts from this
school are on the way. An advance copy of British trip-hop folkie Pauline
Taylor's just-finished
album indicates she is a blazing talent; Austin, Texas-based
singer-songwriter Kacy Crowley is
another one to watch, judging by an early listen to her confident debut,
Anchorless; and Chantal
Kreviazuk's just-out Under These Rocks and Stones is also a charmer.

Perhaps someday we'll see Taylor, Crowley or Kreviazuk at Lilith. McLachlan
wants the tour to
become an annual event; she even foresees a day when men are invited. (One
of this year's bands,
the Cardigans, has men, but the lead singer is a woman.) Says McLachlan:
"We hope this will pave
the way for more female performers. We hope it's a great thing for young
women too. When I was
growing up, we had very few role models to look up to. This is a great
example of strong women
out there doing something they love, doing something really positive."

Lilith Fair is already doing something positive for the summer concert
business, which was in the
doldrums. Tickets for Lilith, which cost between $12.50 and $46, are going
fast in most of the
remaining cities and in some cases are already gone. The first week of
shows were all sellouts.

What was that line Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own? "I should
remind you how
much depends on you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future."
At Lilith you can
sense the summer shifting, the musical center moving. Said 18-year-old
fairgoer Cindy Chen of
Seattle: "I don't like [alternative rock]. Too much moshing and men
throwing themselves around.
It's dangerous."

Lilith, at the show in George, proved to be a safe, sacred spot. Here were
teenage girls in cutoff
jeans and bikini tops, middle-aged moms in baggy T shirts and running
shoes. Here a woman
breast-fed her baby during Jewel's set; here fans sat dead-quiet, listening
to the lyrics. Here a
woman wore a T shirt marked "dyke" with a parodic Nike swoosh, while two
other women
walked comfortably hand in hand. Here a man in a concession-stand line
talked excitedly about
Sarah McLachlan's songwriting skills. Said Shellie Knawa, 30, a Seattle
computer-manual writer:
"This is finally a chance for our voice, women, to be heard." It's still
summer. But the season's
a-changin'.

- -- WITH REPORTING BY DAVID E. THIGPEN/GEORGE AND LISA MCLAUGHLIN/NEW
YORK


                          time-webmaster@pathfinder.com

"do you love me because i am beautiul, or am i beautiful because you love me?"
        oscar hammerstein II



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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 10:32:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: HunterXTC@aol.com
Subject: (harbinger) some random offerings....

first of all for a cool picture of phil and paula check out the lillith page
on the web... it is in the st louis section of the picture gallery page 3.

also i was at my fave used cd store the other day and i bought the cd
cockamamie by jenifer tryin... for along time i had always loved the song
better than nothing, but i never knew who sang it.. imagine my surprise when
i got the cd home and heard it on there!!! does anyone have any info on
her>>???? the bassist on the cd ismike rivard (who toured with paula for
awhile), and in the credits, she gives a thank you to jay bellerose.. so
there has got to be some kinda boston connection.....

has anyone picked up this month's edition of spin magazine???? of couse it is
a keepsake because ani difranco is on the cover (yessss) but theres an
interesting article in it about vh-1 and the direction they are going in....
senior vice president  wayne issaks and network president john sykes are both
quoted as saying the network is building itself around artists like paula.
 the author of the piece, eric weisbard isnt really a big fan of paula or the
vh-1 roster of artists in heavy rotation (a new crop of james taylors and
carly simons he calls them-- whats wrong with that??)
but anyway here's a section of the article...

oddly, both issaks and sykes in conversation staked their claim to vh-1's
artistic progressiveness around paula cole's vaguely artsy, vaguely ironic
where have all the cowboys gone.  issaks calls cole  "kind of an edgy
performance-rock artist" who subsumes tori amos and lou reed, while sykes
sees the song as the epitome of adult art.  if you listen to the lyrics
theyre really about the disillusionment of getting married, of whats been
promised to you from a woman's standpoint, and what the woman gets. i think
thats hard for a 17 year old to connect with.....

well... i guess he managed to lump paula into a category (something she
hates) and piss off anyone under 18 in the process.... your music television
at work :)

hoping kenn had as much fun at the michigan lillith as i did in cleveland
!!!!

spanish



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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 11:12:42 -0400
From: Allyson Kalea Boggess <boggessw@eznet.net>
Subject: (harbinger) Canandaigua Lilith

Hiyas :)  I just wanted to let everyone know I am so psyched to see
Paula tomorrow at Canandaigua (!!) Lilith...and I'll be wearing a red &
green sparkly ribbon in my hair so all you onliners can recognize me if
you're going.  If you see me say hi!!

In peace,
Allyson
boggessw@vivanet.com


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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 11:58:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: ErinCBTM@aol.com
Subject: (harbinger) Michigan Lilith

  I was most impressed by Paula's stage presence and her talent of course.
 She was the best.  Called us "darlings"! Her performance gave you the idea
that she is a very strong person, comfortable with herself and life.  Next -
I've always been a huge fan of Fiona Apple, but her personality and presence
wasn't extremely impressive...I'm much more taken with the artists who say
little and do a great job of performing, than those who make sheep noises
into the microphone...even though it was still kinda funny.  She seemed a
little off...one moment looking ready to cry, the next sneaking a smile like
she was trying to fool us or something.  But still a good performance.  Sarah
was wonderful also...the same sure, strong feeling that Paula had.  She was
really the star of the show.
- -Erin (listening to Surfacing....no verdict yet.;)

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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 13:47:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Detour97@aol.com
Subject: Re: (harbinger) 'Surfacing' & it's monotony

Her cover of "Dear God" rocks!!!

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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 14:38:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Detour97@aol.com
Subject: Re: (harbinger) Hello

Paula toured with Peter Gabriel during his Secret World Live Tour in '94.
 YOu can check her out on the live double CD.  She also released her first
solo album in '94 called, "Harbinger".  If you can find that album, it's
great.  It's actually still my favorite one by Paula.

Good luck in finding them.

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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 17:24:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Honoku@aol.com
Subject: Re: (harbinger) TIME/LILITH FAIR

thanks for the time/lilith article, it was interesting.

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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 00:15:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: borchers@bluemoon.net (m borchers)
Subject: Re: (harbinger) Canandaigua Lilith

i'll be there too allyson.
hard not to notice me - i'll be the one with her legs bilaterally casted...
ouch!
hoping tomorrow's weather will be as beautiful as todays!!!
michele

>Hiyas :)  I just wanted to let everyone know I am so psyched to see
>Paula tomorrow at Canandaigua (!!) Lilith...and I'll be wearing a red &
>green sparkly ribbon in my hair so all you onliners can recognize me if
>you're going.  If you see me say hi!!
>
>In peace,
>Allyson

"do you love me because i am beautiul, or am i beautiful because you love me?"
        oscar hammerstein II



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End of harbinger-digest V2 #13
******************************